Donnie’s Got a Death Wish
Everything you need to know for Wednesday, Oct. 7: Nice work, Cal + Wake teachers say no to school + ICE becomes a propaganda arm
Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2020
27 days until the election
2 days until the voter registration deadline (click here to see if you’re registered)
8 days until early voting begins (you can register during early voting, too)
20 days until the deadline for absentee ballot requests
Today’s Number: 28
While nearly 60 Confederate monuments have been toppled since this spring’s George Floyd protests—some by protesters, others by local governments—state and local officials around the country have taken action to protect 28 of them, including:
2 in Arizona, which is a) not in the South, and b) didn’t become a state until 47 years after the Confederacy fell
1 in Michigan, which was part of the Union)
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Maybe Donnie’s Got a Death Wish
It’s not the one you’re thinking of.
Yes, the president came home on Monday juiced on steroids and proclaimed himself King Donald, Conquerer of COVID. Yes, Facebook had to remove a post yesterday in which he (sigh) falsely claimed the flu was worse than the disease that has killed 210,000 Americans and landed him in the hospital.
Yes, his doctors are still releasing Dear Leader statements about his godlike health. Yes, though it borders on criminal negligence, the White House has refused to do contact tracing following the superspreader party it threw for Amy Coney Barrett.
Yes, Mike Pence is all but daring Kamala Harris to do tonight’s VP debate without precautions. Yes, though President Trump should still be quarantining, he insists he’s going to the next presidential debate, a week from tomorrow.
And yes, the administration was going to block the FDA’s guidelines for a coronavirus vaccine—which would end the chance of anything arriving before the election—until the FDA unilaterally published the guidelines on its website.
So, yes, as I’ve written before—and before that—Donald Trump is willing to risk your life (and, I suppose, his) to get re-elected. But we knew that already.
The death wish I’m referring to is political.
There’s a not-small possibility that, whether he knew it or not, Trump threw in the towel at 2:48 p.m. yesterday:
From The Washington Post:
Trump’s tweets sent the stock market lower, as many businesses, households and investors had been hoping for a sudden jolt of fiscal stimulus amid signs the economy had lost momentum. The Dow Jones industrial average ended down 376 points, or 1.3 percent. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 also fell.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. Per Nate Silver:
The possibility that the race would tighten in the stretch run because of economic improvement was one of the things helping Trump most in our model. … Now, though, with voters possibly encountering news of layoffs instead of renewed growth, Trump may have undermined his best comeback strategy.
Here’s why it makes zero political sense:
The person who publicly ends negotiations gets blamed for the stalemate.
When you’re down nine points four weeks before an election, don’t turn down a chance to send people $1,200 checks.
When you’ve based your theory of re-election on an economy that has millions of fewer jobs now than it had in February, don’t turn down a chance to jumpstart it.
Here’s how the economy goes from bad to worse:
If Trump loses, he’ll lose interest in governing during the lame duck.
The second Joe Biden is sworn in, Republicans will recommit themselves to Deficit Jesus, freak out about the trillions of dollars they’ve been recklessly spending, and start demanding Austerity Now, Austerity Forever.
The chances of a meaningful stimulus will vanish.
Cause, effect: The markets will price in this scenario, sending them into a tailspin, hurting Trump’s re-election chances even more, and the cycle reinforces itself.
A few hours later, Trump veered from telling Congress to piss off to demanding that Congress do what he says.
RELATED: Roy Cooper is not a fan of President Trump’s COVID bravado.
LOCAL & STATE
—> Cal Cunningham Is “Weird” in the Sack
It turns out the world’s most generic God-and-“BBQ” Democrat in the country’s most important Senate race was not only lame-sexting a spokeswoman for the weed industry, but he was lame-sexing her as well.
In a series of interviews late Monday as well as in the text messages, [Arlene] Guzman Todd described two in-person encounters with Cunningham, one in March in Los Angeles that she said did not include intimate contact and a second in July in North Carolina, where she said they were intimate.
In the text messages to her friend, Guzman Todd told her she was intimate with Cunningham in his home, which she later characterized as “weird.”
Having read the aforementioned text messages, I can’t imagine that any intimate encounter with Cal would not be weird. But since you’re reading this over breakfast, let’s move on to a more pleasant subject: politics.
While Cunningham is the country’s most boring-yet-consequential philanderer, Thom Tillis has spent the last year humping Donald Trump’s leg like an intact chihuahua. So now, the GOP is spending tons of money to make Cal’s infidelity the most scandalous thing since Bill Clinton made parents explain fellatio to their preteens. (Hey, cool, the N&O’s editorial board is still church-ladying like it’s 1997.)
Will anyone care?
In the latest polling, Reuters has Cunningham up five, while ECU has Tillis up one. These surveys were taken after the sexting story broke on Friday, but before this development.
Cunningham’s sex life might not be any of our business, but we’re going to spend the next week talking about it anyway, and that’s not good for his campaign. In a race like this, anything that moves the needle even slightly could determine whether Mitch McConnell gets to call himself majority leader next year.
—> Wake Teachers Say No to School
It seems Wake County teachers are less than enthusiastic about returning to in-person instruction amid a pandemic.
Dozens of Wake County teachers warned school board members Tuesday that the lives of educators and students are being put at risk by reopening schools for in-person instruction. The Wake County school board approved a plan last week that will begin returning elementary and middle school students for in-person classes on Oct. 26.
An elementary school teacher in Stanly County died of COVID earlier this week, though she appears to have caught the virus elsewhere and no students have become sick. Five staff members at an elementary school in Asheville have also tested positive, a week after that school district began in-person instruction; the school district says no students came into contact with them.
The science suggests that while young kids can catch COVID-19, they are at less risk from it than the adults who teach and clean up after them, and older kids are at more risk than younger kids. Still, some Wake parents are upset that high schoolers aren’t going back to the classroom until January.
—> Should Wake Ditch SROs?
Since we’re talking about the school board: Advocates are pushing them to abolish school resource officers, who they claim do further the school-to-prison pipeline more than protect kids.
School board chairman Keith Sutton said everything is on the table, including keeping the school resource officers or replacing them with alternatives such as more school counselors trained to deescalate situations. Sutton said creating a school district police force—an idea previously dismissed as being too expensive—is also up for discussion. …
Black students accounted for 61% of the referrals to the adult and juvenile courts, Teen Court and other diversion programs filed last school year by school resource officers. Black students only make up 22% of the district’s enrollment.
Someone needs to explain to me how “creating our own police force” is going to make anything better.
—> UNC Sociologist Wins Genius Grant
Kudos to Tressie McMillan Cottom, whom the Macarthur Foundation praised for “shaping discourse on pressing issues at the confluence of race, gender, education, and digital technology.” In particular, the foundation applauded the N.C. Central grad’s critical study on for-profit colleges and her most recent book, a collection of essays on how Black women are viewed in America.
RELATED: UNC administrators have told employees to get ready for large budget cuts, history professor Jay Smith opines in the DTH. “Given their numbers and high salaries, the cutting should begin, and perhaps end, with the administrators,” he writes.”
—> Someone Shot Up the Wake Public Safety Center
Someone driving a white Dodge Durango fired into the Wake County Public Safety Center, home to the Sheriff’s Office, at about 3 p.m. yesterday.
“We went through the shock of having our Public Safety center shot up from the street. We had citizens out front standing by to go through the process to obtain pistol permits,” Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker said. “We had officers out there assisting them. I thank God not a single person got hit. All were in the line of fire.”
An hour later, the Sheriff’s Office arrested Willie Lee Hayes Jr. on “multiple charges.” They didn’t provide a possible motive.
—> Dumbass Tries, Fails to Entrap Democracy NC
You know those conservative “journalists” who do “undercover” “investigations” into “left-wing” organizations that always get the Breitbart crew atwitter but promptly fall apart under the tiniest shred of scrutiny? One of them tried to hit the local do-gooders at Democracy NC.
The Daily Beast reported that James Lalino, aka James Fortune, aka Lefty, aka a weightlifting New Yorker affiliated with Project Veritas, tried to infiltrate voter education groups in North Carolina, probably to find “voter fraud” or whatever.
From NC Policy Watch:
Entrapment appears to be Lalino’s motive when he began making odd inquiries of nonpartisan voter education groups in North Carolina. Policy Watch reported last month that Lalino, through his “business partner,” Blue Sky Med Labs based in Georgia, had wired $4,500 to Democracy North Carolina. …
But Lalino’s behavior and line of questioning seemed awkward; he lives in New York City but claimed to be opening a gym in North Carolina, even though at the time all fitness facilities were closed because of COVID-19.
—> Weather
Mostly clear, high of 84, which is too hot for October. ☀️☀️☀️
NATION & WORLD
—> How ICE Became Trump’s Propaganda Arm
If you’ve been on the receiving end of ICE’s press releases or dealt with their spokespeople in the last four years, the fact that the agency has become a very enthusiastic defender of Trumpism will not surprise.
But that doesn’t make this story in The Nation any less disturbing. It describes the agency’s war with Talia Lavin, a former New Yorker fact-checker who wondered on Twitter whether an agent’s tattoo was a white supremacist symbol. It was a dumb tweet that cost Levin her job. But ICE’s reaction was—how to put this—insane.
The next day, ICE shot back. They issued a press release, posted in a Twitter thread, mentioning Lavin by name. The statement accused Lavin of “baselessly slandering an American hero,” whom it described as a combat-wounded marine corps veteran who’d had both legs amputated, and demanded an apology and retraction from both her and her employer. …
Almost immediately, Lavin received a flood of abusive messages, including anti-semitic and mysognistic slurs. … The furious response would only grow after Fox News’s Laura Ingraham broadcasted a segment referencing the ordeal, calling Lavin and another reporter, Lauren Duca, “little journo terrorists,” and demanding that Lavin be fired. …
Then comes the part where ICE deployed armed agents in response to a mean tweet.
—> Defying Supreme Court, the EPA and Oklahoma Screw Native Americans
Credit where due: The Young Turks broke this story, but TYT’s version is basically unreadable—seriously, get an editor—so we’ll rely on other sources.
Here’s the gist: Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation was still sovereign, which encouraged other tribes to seek the same authority—including, perhaps, to tax and regulate non-Native industries on their land.
The state’s Republicans don’t want this to happen. Neither do petroleum executives. Enter a rider to an 836-page 2005 highway bill, courtesy of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, that grants the EPA the authority to give the state control over environmental issues on tribal lands in Oklahoma, sovereignty be damned. Oklahoma just has to ask.
After McGirt, Oklahoma asked. On Oct. 1, the EPA obliged.
From The New Republic:
“Given the cozy relationship between Oklahoma lawmakers and the gas and oil industry, the EPA’s decision effectively hands power over hazardous waste dumping, fracking, and the purposeful diversion of industrialized farm runoff on tribal lands to a slim number of industry executives.”
—> Polling Update
North Carolina: Tie 47–47 (Ipsos)
North Carolina: Biden 49–47 (Change Research)
North Carolina: Biden 50–47 (ECU)
Arizona: Biden 46–45 (Highground)
Arizona: Biden 51–45 (Change Research)
Arizona: Biden 49–45 (Strategies 360)
Florida: Biden 50–46 (Change Research)
Florida: Biden 51–45 (UNF)
Florida: Tie 45–45 (Suffolk)
Michigan: Biden 51–43 (Ipsos)
Michigan: Biden 51–43 (Change Research)
New Hampshire: Biden 53–44 (American Research Group)
Pennsylvania: Biden 50–46 (Change Research)
Pennsylvania: Biden 54–44 (Monmouth)
Wisconsin: Biden 51–44 (Change Research)
National: Biden 53–42 (USC)
National: Biden 50–42 (Redfield & Wilton)
National: Biden 49–40 (Leger)
National: Biden: 57–41 (CNN/SSRS)
National: Biden 53–43 (SurveyUSA)
National: Biden 51–37 (Global Marketing Research Services)
NC Governor: Cooper 53–40 (ECU)
—> The Roundup
The IRS is investigating NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre for tax fraud.
Michelle Obama called Trump “racist” and “morally wrong.”
Congressional investigators say tech giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have engaged in monopolistic practices.
The Trump administration is seeking to delay the National Climate Assessment.
Maybe we should pay less attention to Claudia Conway, a 15-year-old with family problems.
Stephen Miller, aka White Supremacist Gumby, has COVID.
OUR SO-CALLED LIVES
—> Regal Theatres Are Closing, Effective Tomorrow
On Thursday, the Regal movie theater chain will close all 536 of its movie theaters across the U.S., the latest blow to the industry.
Per NPR, the closure “reflects ‘an increasingly challenging theatrical landscape’ due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is temporary, the chain said. Regal is shutting down theaters again less than two months after it started to reopen U.S. locations in late August. The decision was announced after the James Bond franchise's No Time to Die was shelved until 2021, further pushing back a release that had already been delayed.”
Prediction: Movie theaters aren’t coming back on the other side of the pandemic.
Since we’re streaming everything: Could Netflix please stop cancelling its best shows?
—> RIP, Eddie
Just listen to the isolated guitar track from “I’m the One.”
